She's Like a Rainbow

"Rory, I'm completely shocked to hear this. To quit your senior year...as captain...I just don't know what to say." Her pursed lips and crossed arms didn't fool me for a second. She held her lips together tightly, not in disdain, but to suppress a smile. Amy Thomas was getting everything she wanted, but for her the cherry on top was getting to talk down to me in the process.

Amy was not shocked. She knew exactly why I had called them here, the week before school started. But we had to play the game for the benefit of sweet Miss Milton, the somewhat ditzy but well meaning advisor and coach to the Castle Rock High School Cheerleading Squad.

"Amy, Miss Milton...I hope you understand that I've thought so carefully about this and really believe this is the right decision. I have so much going on this year that I know I wouldn't be the captain this squad deserves. I know the girls will be in great hands with Amy, she's such a terrific leader." I forced a smile through a painted forlorn expression. I had committed to selling this lie and there was no turning back now.

"Well, when you put it like that Rory I guess you're making the responsible decision, but I can't say I'm not disappointed. When Theresa quit the squad last week everyone was devastated of course, but to lose you, our captain, the girls will be simply crushed." Miss Milton mused as I noticed a smile pull at the edge of Amy's lips and I felt the smug satisfaction of watching her facade crack ever so slightly.

"What did Nick have to say about this?" Amy's voice chimed in again. It was so kind of Amy to always think of Nick. Not enough people worried about the hulking 6'4, charismatic, green eyed stud tight end who was being recruited by six colleges, I sure hoped he would land on his feet.

"Nick is so supportive, he understands that both of us getting into a good college is what's most important for our future. The schools recruiting him are so competitive, we want to make sure both of our grades stay strong." I felt myself wretch at how strongly I enunciated the "us" and "we" in each sentence, as if everyone didn't already know that Rory Scanlon had hitched her wagon to the Nick Wilson train, destination anywhere but Castle Rock.

"Still, it would have been so sweet to have the memories of you as captains of cheer and football together, it's a shame you couldn't make it work." The sickening sweet tone of her voice and fake smile would have definitely been different had Miss Milton not been there. The day would come when Amy Thomas and Rory Scanlon dropped the gloves, but today was not that day.

I convinced Miss Milton that it would be too hard to tell the rest of the team and that I trusted she and Amy to handle it. A fake hug to each of them and thus ended Rory Scanlon's illustrious career as a Castle Rock Raider Cheerleader.

I walked out to the parking lot and toward Theresa, who leaned against my car smoking a cigarette. "Is it done?" She gleefully yelled as I grew closer. I pretended to tear up again and mimicked wiping teardrops from my cheek. "It's over! You should have seen Amy's reaction. She is definitely not in consideration for an academy award this year, she could barely keep the excitement off her face." I laughed as I unlocked my car door and slid inside.

Theresa plopped down in the passenger seat next to me and I turned to leave the parking lot. We watched a group of freshman girls walking toward field hockey tryouts, their sweet nervous energy made me smile.

"Could you imagine if you told freshman Rory and Tre that we quit the squad senior year? They'd have us committed to an asylum." I laughed.

Theresa nodded enthusiastically. "We were so young and naive. Stay innocent little ones, don't let high school beat you down like it did to me!" She clenched her fist and dramatically motioned to the field hockey freshmen as we passed.

"Amy had the nerve to ask me how Nick feels about me quitting...she's always had it so bad for him, it's so sad." I rolled my eyes.

"Oh, did you neglect to mention that part of the reason you're quitting is because Nick's gotta keep a 3.5 GPA for Penn State and Maryland to even look at him? Your boy is cute, Rory, but he is not pulling those grades on his own."

"Excuse me, the real reason I quit is because I refuse to spend every afternoon with Alice Gilmore. Not wasting my senior year hanging with homewreckers and homewrecker apologists like Amy Thomas. Nick just thinks I quit to spend more time with him, you know any discussion of your situation is a no fly zone."

Theresa had started dating Nick's best friend Tony a few months after he and I got together sophomore year. We always joked how lucky we were, that best friends got to date best friends. It turns out that when your boyfriend's best friend cheats on your best friend, things go from lucky to unlucky very quickly. Tony started sneaking around with Alice Gilmore, a well liked sophomore who was also a member of the squad, back in April and was able to keep it a secret through the summer. Unfortunately, Alice had a little pregnancy scare and had a meltdown to her mother and revealed the whole thing. Mrs. Gilmore marched her daughter right up to the Raymond house and demanded Tony answer for the situation. Her timing was impeccable, as Theresa and his entire family were over to celebrate his father's birthday. The scare turned out to be a false alarm, but the damage was done. Theresa was devastated.

Tony's parents had never been fully on board with his relationship with Theresa and used this as an opportunity to convince him to end things. The suspect timing of their breakup and the arrival of his brand new black on black Impala had everyone gossiping - especially the cheerleading squad. Theresa refused to be on a team with Alice and quit at the beginning of August. I wanted to immediately follow suit, but knew as incoming captain it would be a little more complicated for me to just walk away. I had my suspicions that Nick knew that Tony had been messing around, but rather than push Nick for details and risk upsetting him I figured I'd exchange my silence for understanding as to why I wanted to quit the squad.

Nick didn't love the idea of me quitting the squad at first, much like Amy had said he dug the idea of us both being captains our senior year. It didn't take much convincing to remind him that cheer is busiest in the fall and he needed to have a strong first semester to get the best scholarship offer he could. I don't remember when exactly it happened...one minute I was helping him study for a geography test sophomore year and the next it was junior year and I was at his house nearly every night doing the work for him and making sure he copied it over convincingly. Dragging him through his academics and keeping his GPA competitive so he could focus on football was practically a full time job.

"Well I appreciate the solidarity, but you know eventually he's going to make you double with Tony and Alice. You aren't going to escape it forever." Theresa tossed her cigarette butt out the window.

"Exactly, which is why I can't tolerate being on the squad with her. Our paths are going to cross sooner rather than later. I'd rather keep it social over a rum and coke at a post game party than have to smile at her at practice every day."

"Speaking of cocktails, how do you think Ashley's going to take the news?" Theresa raised an eyebrow and smirked at me.

The crowd at our country club called Ashley Scanlon eccentric. They did so to be polite, as using terms like "pill popper" or "drunk" or "unstable" were generally frowned upon. I had the privilege of calling Ashley Scanlon my mother, but it was a title that didn't suit her. Ashley's maternal instincts were questionable at best.

She was not going to take my departure from the squad well. A proud teen beauty pageant title holder, the former Miss Fairfield County Connecticut embarked on a whirlwind romance with the much older Luke Scanlon following a chance meeting on a train in the early 40s. Lured away from college by the promise of a glamorous life as a city society wife, she became a darling of the Boston scene and acclimated quickly to her life as a businessman's wife. Things hit a snag when I was 8, right after they announced she was pregnant with my sister Olivia. My father was promoted and relocated to manage his company's real estate holdings in Maine. Ashley Scanlon was not built for a small town like Castle Rock and she did not adjust to things well. Feeling isolated from her friends back in Boston and trapped in a house with a colicky infant and two small children prompted her to start drinking during the day. The wine to relax when the baby finally cried herself to sleep quickly turned vodka straight up at breakfast.

My father, always quick to throw money at his problems, found a place down in York Beach that was a rehab facility masquerading as a spa for tired rich ladies. She stayed at Seaside Inn for nearly three months back in 1953 and returned calmer, more at ease. She told us that the ocean air did her wonders and spent the next few months begging my father for a beach house of her own. It wasn't until I was a little older that I realized the change in her had less to do with the ocean air and more to do with the little orange pill bottles that newly lined the shelves of her medicine cabinet.

Pleased that she appeared to be making progress, my father continued to oblige her every whim. He bought her a dream summer home on the ocean in Old Orchard, paid for membership at the local country club where she never wore the same outfit twice and spared no expense for myself and my sisters. They quickly rose the social ranks in our small community and dragged us along in tow. However, their increasingly busy social life put Ashley on the wrong end of a champagne glass perhaps before she was ready. The wine with dinner at the club mixed with the medication she was reliant on to get through the day was beginning to impact her moods again. Two years later she was back at the Seaside Inn for another break.

It became a pattern we grew accustomed to - it was like my mother was a car who needed frequent tuneups - whenever she started to fall into bad patterns my father would pack her a bag and drive her down to York, where she'd stay a week or two. They'd dry her out and change up her pills and when she returned home she was calmer, steadier...until she wasn't - it didn't take much to set her off.

Castle Rock and the surrounding towns offered very little in the way of beauty pageants and debutante balls, which was a spot of consistent disappointment to my mother as her upbringing had been marked with many of those occasions. As a result, small town spectacles like prom, homecoming and the spring charity gala at the country club became of the utmost importance for the whole family. A part of her had been waiting for my senior year her entire life so she could have one last hurrah at living vicariously through me to relive her glory days. Removing cheerleading from that picture was not going to be well received.

"So she's bringing the girls home from the beach on Thursday, so I have a couple of days to refine my strategy, but I think I'm just going to use the Nick angle. I'm still going to be Vice President of the Football Boosters, I'm on the Country Club Young Leader Council, I have to keep my grades and Nick's grades up...if I had to pick one thing to go cheerleading is the natural fit." I said with confidence.

"It's going to totally suck to have her home. It's been so nice having the house to myself for the past month."

"Has your dad been around?" Theresa inquired. I shot her a look, reminding her that although Luke might have slept at the same house during the week while my mother and sisters were at our beach house in Old Orchard, our paths didn't find reasons to cross frequently. He was busy with work and used the time away from my mother to perfect his golf swing, so he wasn't around very much. He had a pretty hands off approach to the whole parenting thing and as long as the house didn't burn down he typically stayed out of my way.

"House is empty right now, want to come over and burn one?"

Theresa nodded enthusiastically and her eyes lit up. We had started smoking grass in junior high and it was our favorite way to unwind. We were poking around my dad's office when we were 12 or so and found his stash. I remember being so shocked that my father smoked grass, but as I've gotten older and see what a handful my mother is, I'm surprised he doesn't indulge in the harder stuff. We would steal from him here and there, until Theresa's older sister Nancy caught us once. She hooked us up with one of her friends who gave us a covert steady supply. Nick hated smoking, whether it be grass or cigarettes, so it was something Theresa and I did in secret. I had a little alcove outside my bedroom window where she and I would curl up and share joints, it was our favorite place to hang out and talk.

We turned up Castle View by the service station and continued to gossip and talk about school starting. My heart sank when my mother's white cadillac sat in front of the house. "NOOOOO! She's not supposed to be back until Thursday! This is garbage!" I dramatically smashed my head into the steering wheel.

"Is it too late to turn around? No offense Rory, if your mom is off schedule then it's probably for a reason…" Theresa looked uneasy. She had been over when Ashley was in one of her moods and I understood it was far from a pleasant experience.

"No worries, I'll drop you at home." I slowly backed down the street and turned around undetected. I left Theresa in her driveway and turned back up toward the view, a pit in my stomach starting to form as I wondered why my mother and sisters were home a few days early.

When I pulled up to the house for the second time, my 12 year old sister Kendall was outside getting her duffle bag out of the trunk. She waited for me to park my car with an annoyed expression.

"Do I want to know why you're home early?" I asked as I walked over to her.

"Georgette quit." Kendall swung her bag over her shoulder and reached up to close the trunk of the car.

My jaw dropped. Georgette Francouer had been our housekeeper since we moved to Castle Rock nearly ten years earlier. She was a sweet, but no nonsense French Canadian woman who was the heartbeat of our household. My mother was far from a domestic type and could barely boil water. Georgette prepared every meal, did every load of laundry, and more notably was the warm presence who welcomed us home from school each day.

"What happened?"

Kendall walked toward the house and I hurriedly followed her. She whipped around. "I'll tell you what happened later, but not when Mom can hear."

We stepped through the front door and the foyer was littered with suitcases and bags of dirty laundry. Kendall tossed her duffle carelessly on the floor as my mother appeared in the kitchen doorway. "What did I tell you on the drive home? We aren't going to have help for a while so you better not leave that bag lying around like that." My mother stood tall in a trendy sleeveless floral dress as Kendall reached back down for her bag. Ashley's eyes turned to me. "Did she tell you? Did she tell you that after treating that woman like family for nearly a decade that she just up and left us out of nowhere?"

Kendall lifted her bag over her shoulder and scampered up to her room as my mother spoke. I took it as a symbol that Kendall didn't want to relive my mother's version of whatever had happened.

"She told me she quit, not what happened." I said carefully, bracing myself to hear a series of exaggerations from my mother's lips.

"Come, sit in the kitchen. I have a drink somewhere." My mother whipped around and I noticed the clock on the wall read 2:38PM, wondering if most households started cocktail hour this early.

I followed her into the kitchen and saw her pick up an enormous glass of white wine. She took a gulp and leaned against the counter as I took a seat at the kitchen table.

"I got home from tennis today, probably around 10:30, and the girls are nowhere to be found. I ask her, Georgette, where is everyone? She tells me she asked Kendall to take Olivia to play down on the boardwalk so she and I could talk. I rolled my eyes, what on earth could this woman want to talk about, but I humored her and asked her to pour us both a drink and that is when she told me that our family had become "too stressful" for her and that she was leaving that day and moving back to Bar Harbor to be closer to her son. Can you imagine? After everything we've done for her, she quits with no notice and calls us stressful? What's stressful is thinking about training a new housekeeper so things stay up to snuff around here." My mother's tone volleyed between animated and incoherent, sips of wine punctuated each sentence.

I found my mind drifting, imagining how the events had really played out as my mother continued. "So, there I was, left all alone with an entire house to pack up. I walked next door to see if Carol Baker's housekeeper had a free moment to spare or knew of anyone who might be available to help me and she could not have been less helpful. Luckily the girls came home and they helped throw everything in the suitcases and here we are. I'm going to start calling agencies at this very moment because I certainly do not have time to deal with this."

I sighed, the loss of Georgette hitting me. I looked around the untidy kitchen that I was tasked with keeping orderly while Georgette accompanied my mother and sisters to Old Orchard for the summer. She told me that she better not pay a surprise visit home to find dishes in the sink or dust on the bar. I knew the current state of the kitchen would leave her disappointed and grew increasingly emotional as I realized she'd never set foot in this house to scold me for it again.

"Lauren, get the phone book, will you? I need to get some replacement candidates in here immediately. You girls start school in a few days and this household will crumble without some help. And I suppose I should call your father…he'll need to know what happened."

Replacement. We'd never replace Georgette. I stared at my mother for a moment, who swished the remaining wine around in her glass, staring into the spiral it created. I wondered if she really thought it would be so simple to find someone to seamlessly blend into our home as Georgette had or if she was as sad and disappointed as I was that we'd never see her again. I knew I had to get the real story from Kendall, so I walked over to the drawer where the phone book was kept and handed it to my mother. As she began to leaf through the pages with her brightly manicured fingers, I crept out of the kitchen and up the stairs to Kendall's room.

Kendall was lazily unpacking her duffle bag, poorly attempting to sort out balled up dirty clothes from wrinkled potentially clean ones. I shut the door behind me and plopped down on her bed. "Okay, so what really happened?"

She sighed and joined me on the bed. "This morning around 10 the phone rang at the beach house and Georgie answered it. She looked concerned right away and said she'd be right there. She told me mom needed to be picked up at the club and said she'd drop off on the boardwalk so we could be out of the house when she got home. She umm, hasn't been feeling well in the mornings all summer and Georgette has had to pick her up in the morning from the club more than once…she doesn't always come home…"

I cringed, having a sense of where this story was going. The Beach Club my family belonged to in Old Orchard was a nonstop party all summer long. Wives whose husbands went back to work during the week had endless cocktail parties every night of the week. My mother never missed a party and I'm sure as the summer was coming to a close the many nights of overindulgence were starting to get to her, but to hear that she never made it home and needed someone to pick her up the following morning was concerning to say the least.

Kendall continued. "When we got to the boardwalk, she got out of the car which was weird and gave us each a big hug. I thought it was a little weird, but when we got home around lunchtime and she was gone it all added up. When we got back, mom was frantically throwing clothes and stuff everywhere and it was crazy…she told us Georgette said we were too stressful for her and that she never really loved us and wasn't coming back. Liv started to cry and Mom got so mad at her…"

"Where's Olivia now?" I popped up, realizing I hadn't seen her since arriving home.

"We passed some of her friends playing outside on the way home and Mom dropped her there. She's down at the Maguires."

I nodded, relieved and encouraged her to go on.

"So Mom tells us we need to pack up as much of the house as we can and get home so Dad can get a new housekeeper immediately. And she's the one who dumped all the bags in the foyer, not me. I don't know why I got yelled at for it…"

I sighed. "So she's really gone? No way dad can reason with her to get her back?"

Kendall shrugged. "I think it was pretty obvious by the way mom was yelling about it the whole ride home that it's over. Poor Liv asked who was going to make our dinners and if we would starve to death without her." She started to giggle at Olivia's question, which admittedly made me smile too.

"Well, Dad's eaten at the Club every night this week and I haven't gone to the market, so we actually might. There isn't a single thing to eat in this house. Let's go pick up Olivia and go to the store so we at least have some snacks." I hopped off the bed.

Kendall smiled. "Good. I didn't want to be stuck in the house with Mom in such a crappy mood." We bounced out of her room and slid down the stairs. I heard my mother's unsteady voice on the phone rambling on so we snuck out the front door undetected.

"I thought cheer practice started this week, I'm surprised you were even home." Kendall said as an overwhelming sense of dread washed over me. I still had to tell my mother that I had quit cheerleading, which wouldn't have gone well under the best of circumstances and certainly wasn't going to be welcomed news after losing Georgette.

I stayed quiet, debating whether I should lie to my sister or come clean now. Luckily she started chattering about something funny that she and Olivia had seen on the boardwalk earlier and got distracted. I smiled, relieved to push that conversation to another time.

I parked outside the Maguire's house and sent Kendall in to get Olivia. It was all starting to hit me. I thought my biggest obstacle to overcome in the next couple of weeks was going to be managing my mother's reaction to me quitting the cheerleading squad. Georgette is the one who made sure we were all ready for school in the morning. Georgette packed our lunches, did our laundry, helped the girls with homework, drove them to ballet…but she did so much more. She listened to our problems, laughed at us and cut us down to size when we needed it, comforted us when our mother wasn't around…

I thought back to Kendall's explanation of the morning's events. The club calling our house to find someone to collect my mother after a night of heavy partying when it was clear that it wasn't the first time a call like this had been made. I tried to picture sweet old Georgette pulling up to the club, helping my hungover and ornery mother into the car and wondering how badly the conversation went that it pushed Georgette to finally reach the end of her rope.

I saw Olivia and Kendall emerge from the house and bounce toward the car. I painted a smile on my face, not wanting my anxiety about the day's events to show. I couldn't shake the feeling that everything was about to change.